About 6 million bees at a bee farm in Hualien County’s Hsincheng Township (新城) were found dead yesterday, allegedly as a result of deliberate poisoning, incurring a loss of an estimated NT$600,000 (US$18,808) to the farm’s owner.
Farm owner Lee Fu-liang (李福涼) said the majority of his bees were dead, while the survivors display little vitality.
“This is outrageous,” Lee said, as he set fire to the poisoned bee hives and bodies.
He said that the perpetrator should have confronted him directly with any issues, instead of resorting to such an inhuman act.
Lee, 60, said he had been raising bees for 40 years, and had never encountered a similar incident before.
He said the allegedly poisoned bees were Western honey bees (Apis mellifera), and that some people might have viewed the bees as an annoyance and sprayed large quantities of pesticide on them.
He said that 170 boxes of bees were poisoned, each containing about 40,000 bees, which caused him considerable loss, “but it is not the money that I am most upset about — it is the loss of my ‘long-term employees’ that grieves me the most.”
Lee said he had reported the incident to the local police, who suspect vandalism, but have not yet identified any potential suspects.
Lee owns nine bee farms in eastern Taiwan and is one of the most prominent bee farmers in the region.
Miaoli District Agricultural Research and Extension Station researcher Wu Teng-chen (吳登楨) said that bees are especially vulnerable to pesticides. Wu said the bees could have died from mass pesticide spraying or feeding on crops or plants with heavy pesticide residue, carried back to the farm from nearby farmland or groves.
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